The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll Part 17

The letter to Harry Furniss elicited a most satisfactory reply. Mr.

Furniss said that he had long wished to ill.u.s.trate one of Lewis Carroll's books, and that he was quite prepared to undertake the work ("Sylvie and Bruno").

[Ill.u.s.tration: H. Furniss. _From a photograph_.]

Two more notes from the Diary, referring to the same month follow:--

_March 10th_.--A great Convocation a.s.sembled in the theatre, about a proposed grant for Physiology, opposed by many (I was one) who wish restrictions to be enacted as to the practice of vivisection for research. Liddon made an excellent speech against the grant, but it was carried by 412 to 244.

_March 29th_.--Never before have I had so many literary projects on hand at once. For curiosity, I will here make a list of them.

(1) Supplement to "Euclid and Modern Rivals."

(2) 2nd Edition of "Euc. and Mod. Rivals."

(3) A book of Math. curiosities, which I think of calling "Pillow Problems, and other Math. Trifles." This will contain Problems worked out in the dark, Logarithms without Tables, Sines and angles do., a paper I am now writing on "Infinities and Infinitesimals," condensed Long Multiplication, and perhaps others.

(4) Euclid V.

(5) "Plain Facts for Circle-Squarers," which is nearly complete, and gives actual proof of limits 3.14158, 3.14160.

(6) A symbolical Logic, treated by my algebraic method.

(7) "A Tangled Tale."

(8) A collection of Games and Puzzles of my devising, with fairy pictures by Miss E.G. Thomson. This might also contain my "Mem. Tech." for dates; my "Cipher-writing" scheme for Letter-registration, &c., &c.

(9) Nursery Alice.

(10) Serious poems in "Phantasmagoria."

(11) "Alice's Adventures Underground."

(12) "Girl's Own Shakespeare." I have begun on "Tempest."

(13) New edition of "Parliamentary Representation."

(14) New edition of Euc. I., II.

(15) The new child's book, which Mr. Furniss is to ill.u.s.trate. I have settled on no name as yet, but it will perhaps be "Sylvie and Bruno."

I have other shadowy ideas, _e.g._, a Geometry for Boys, a vol. of Essays on theological points freely and plainly treated, and a drama on "Alice" (for which Mr.

Mackenzie would write music): but the above is a fair example of "too many irons in the fire!"

A letter written about this time to his friend, Miss Edith Rix, gives some very good hints about how to work, all the more valuable because he had himself successfully carried them out. The first hint was as follows:--

When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, _stop_, you will only hurt yourself by going on. Put it aside till the next morning; and if _then_ you can't make it out, and have no one to explain it to you, put it aside entirely, and go back to that part of the subject which you _do_ understand. When I was reading Mathematics for University honours, I would sometimes, after working a week or two at some new book, and mastering ten or twenty pages, get into a hopeless muddle, and find it just as bad the next morning. My rule was _to begin the book again_. And perhaps in another fortnight I had come to the old difficulty with impetus enough to get over it. Or perhaps not. I have several books that I have begun over and over again.

My second hint shall be--Never leave an unsolved difficulty _behind_. I mean, don't go any further in that book till the difficulty is conquered. In this point, Mathematics differs entirely from most other subjects. Suppose you are reading an Italian book, and come to a hopelessly obscure sentence--don't waste too much time on it, skip it, and go on; you will do very well without it. But if you skip a _mathematical_ difficulty, it is sure to crop up again: you will find some other proof depending on it, and you will only get deeper and deeper into the mud.

My third hint is, only go on working so long as the brain is _quite_ clear. The moment you feel the ideas getting confused leave off and rest, or your penalty will be that you will never learn Mathematics _at all_!

Two more letters to the same friend are, I think, deserving of a place here:--

Eastbourne, _Sept_. 25, 1885.

My dear Edith,--One subject you touch on--"the Resurrection of the Body"--is very interesting to me, and I have given it much thought (I mean long ago). _My_ conclusion was to give up the _literal_ meaning of the _material_ body altogether. _Ident.i.ty_, in some mysterious way, there evidently is; but there is no resisting the scientific fact that the actual _material_ usable for _physical_ bodies has been used over and over again--so that each atom would have several owners. The mere solitary fact of the existence of _cannibalism_ is to my mind a sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_ of the theory that the particular set of atoms I shall happen to own at death (changed every seven years, they say) will be mine in the next life--and all the other insuperable difficulties (such as people born with bodily defects) are swept away at once if we accept S. Paul's "spiritual body," and his simile of the grain of corn. I have read very little of "Sartor Resartus," and don't know the pa.s.sage you quote: but I accept the idea of the material body being the "dress" of the spiritual--a dress needed for material life.

Ch. Ch., _Dec_. 13, 1885.

Dear Edith,--I have been a severe sufferer from _Logical_ puzzles of late. I got into a regular tangle about the "import of propositions," as the ordinary logical books declare that "all _x_ is _z_" doesn't even _hint_ that any _x_'s exist, but merely that the qualities are so inseparable that, if ever _x_ occurs, _z_ must occur also. As to "some _x_ is _z_"

they are discreetly silent; and the living authorities I have appealed to, including our Professor of Logic, take opposite sides! Some say it means that the qualities are so connected that, if any _x_'s _did_ exist, some _must_ be _z_--others that it only means compatibility, _i.e.,_ that some _might_ be _z_, and they would go on a.s.serting, with perfect belief in their truthfulness, "some boots are made of bra.s.s," even if they had all the boots in the world before them, and knew that _none_ were so made, merely because there is no inherent impossibility in making boots of bra.s.s!

Isn't it bewildering? I shall have to mention all this in my great work on Logic--but _I_ shall take the line "any writer may mean exactly what he pleases by a phrase so long as he explains it beforehand." But I shall not venture to a.s.sert "some boots are made of bra.s.s" till I have found a pair! The Professor of Logic came over one day to talk about it, and we had a long and exciting argument, the result of which was "_x -x_"--a magnitude which you will be able to evaluate for yourself.

C. L. Dodgson.

As an example of the good advice Mr. Dodgson used to give his young friends, the following letter to Miss Isabel Standen will serve excellently:--

Eastbourne, _Aug_. 4, 1885.

I can quite understand, and much sympathise with, what you say of your feeling lonely, and not what you can honestly call "happy." Now I am going to give you a bit of philosophy about that--my own experience is, that _every_ new form of life we try is, just at first, irksome rather than pleasant. My first day or two at the sea is a little depressing; I miss the Christ Church interests, and haven't taken up the threads of interest here; and, just in the same way, my first day or two, when I get back to Christ Church, I miss the seaside pleasures, and feel with unusual clearness the bothers of business-routine. In all such cases, the true philosophy, I believe, is "_wait_ a bit." Our mental nerves seem to be so adjusted that we feel _first_ and most keenly, the _dis_-comforts of any new form of life; but, after a bit, we get used to them, and cease to notice them; and _then_ we have time to realise the enjoyable features, which at first we were too much worried to be conscious of.

Suppose you hurt your arm, and had to wear it in a sling for a month. For the first two or three days the discomfort of the bandage, the pressure of the sling on the neck and shoulder, the being unable to use the arm, would be a constant worry. You would feel as if all comfort in life were gone; after a couple of days you would be used to the new sensations, after a week you perhaps wouldn't notice them at all; and life would seem just as comfortable as ever.

So my advice is, don't think about loneliness, or happiness, or unhappiness, for a week or two. Then "take stock" again, and compare your feelings with what they were two weeks previously. If they have changed, even a little, for the better you are on the right track; if not, we may begin to suspect the life does not suit you. But what I want _specially_ to urge is that there's no use in comparing one's feelings between one day and the next; you must allow a reasonable interval, for the _direction of_ change to show itself.

Sit on the beach, and watch the waves for a few seconds; you say "the tide is coming in "; watch half a dozen successive waves, and you may say "the last is the lowest; it is going out." Wait a quarter of an hour, and compare its _average_ place with what it was at first, and you will say "No, it is coming in after all." ...

With love, I am always affectionately yours,

C. L. Dodgson.

The next event to chronicle in Lewis Carroll's Life is the publication, by Messrs. Macmillan, of "A Tangled Tale," a series of mathematical problems which had originally appeared in the _Monthly Packet_. In addition to the problems themselves, the author added their correct solutions, with criticisms on the solutions, correct or otherwise, which the readers of the _Monthly Packet_ had sent in to him. With some people this is the most popular of all his books; it is certainly the most successful attempt he ever made to combine mathematics and humour. The book was ill.u.s.trated by Mr. A.B. Frost, who entered most thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. One of his pictures, "Balbus was a.s.sisting his mother-in-law to convince the dragon," is irresistibly comic. A short quotation will better enable the reader to understand the point of the joke:--

Balbus was waiting for them at the hotel; the journey down had tried him, he said; so his two pupils had been the round of the place, in search of lodgings, without the old tutor who had been their inseparable companion from their childhood. They had named him after the hero of their Latin exercise-book, which overflowed with anecdotes about that versatile genius--anecdotes whose vagueness in detail was more than compensated by their sensational brilliance.

"Balbus has overcome all his enemies" had been marked by their tutor, in the margin of the book, "Successful Bravery." In this way he had tried to extract a moral from every anecdote about Balbus--sometimes one of warning, as in "Balbus had borrowed a healthy dragon," against which he had written, "Rashness in Speculation "--sometimes of encouragement, as in the words, "Influence of Sympathy in United Action," which stood opposite to the anecdote "Balbus was a.s.sisting his mother-in-law to convince the dragon"--and sometimes it dwindled down to a single word, such as "Prudence," which was all he could extract from the touching record that "Balbus, having scorched the tail of the dragon, went away." His pupils liked the short morals best, as it left them more room for marginal ill.u.s.trations, and in this instance they required all the s.p.a.ce they could get to exhibit the rapidity of the hero's departure.

Balbus and his pupils go in search of lodgings, which are only to be found in a certain square; at No. 52, one of the pupils supplements the usual questions by asking the landlady if the cat scratches:--

The landlady looked round suspiciously, as if to make sure the cat was not listening. "I will not deceive you, gentlemen," she said. "It _do_ scratch, but not without you pulls its whiskers! It'll never do it," she repeated slowly, with a visible effort to recall the exact words of some written agreement between herself and the cat, "without you pulls its whiskers!"

"Much may be excused in a cat so treated," said Balbus as they left the house and crossed to No. 70, leaving the landlady curtesying on the doorstep, and still murmuring to herself her parting words, as if they were a form of blessing--"Not without you pulls its whiskers!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a crayon drawing by the Rev. H.C.

Gaye_.]

They secure one room at each of the following numbers--the square contains 20 doors on each side--Nine, Twenty-five, Fifty-two, and Seventy-three. They require three bedrooms and one day-room, and decide to take as day-room the one that gives them the least walking to do to get to it. The problem, of course, is to discover which room they adopted as the day-room. There are ten such "knots" in the book, and few, if any of them, can be untied without a good deal of thought.